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Interdisciplinary research is widely recognized as necessary to tackle some of the grand challenges facing humanity. It is generally believed that interdisciplinarity is becoming increasingly prevalent among Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) fields. However, little is known about the evolution of interdisciplinarity in the Social Sciences. Also, how interdisciplinarity and its various aspects evolve over time has seldom been closely quantified and delineated. This paper answers these questions by capturing the disciplinary diversity of the knowledge base of scientific publications in nine broad Social Sciences fields over 55 years. The analysis considers diversity as a whole and its three distinct aspects, namely variety, balance, and disparity. Ordinary least squares (OLS) regressions are also conducted to investigate whether such change, if any, can be found among research with similar characteristics. We find that learning widely and digging deeply have become one of the norms among researchers in Social Sciences. Fields acting as knowledge exporters or independent domains maintain a relatively stable homogeneity in their knowledge base while the knowledge base of importer disciplines evolves towards greater heterogeneity. However, the increase of interdisciplinarity is substantially smaller when controlling for several author and publication related variables. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper discusses a survey of British academic human geographers enquiring about change and diversification within personal research activities, their nature, motivations and impacts. It argues that this is widespread and a significant aspect of the production of contemporary geographical knowledge. The findings highlight the range of motivations underpinning research change, its impacts and mediation through the institutional context of British human geography. It concludes that despite a more prescriptive institutional context geographers have a degree of autonomy, albeit somewhat fettered, to shape their own research trajectories to some extent. This provides some important capacity with which to engage with imminent challenges facing the discipline in the UK). The paper complements recent critical histories of geography and sociological accounts of the discipline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some thirty years ago, the Kerner Commission report explained the outbursts of urban violence in America’s Black ghettos as caused by Black deprivation wrought by white racism. In its rendition of the Black experience through four hundred years of American racism and its description of the conditions in the urban ghettos of the 1960s, the report is worthy of the acclaim it has received. In its analysis of the causal factors that led to the riots, the report attempts to appeal to intuition but falls far short of making a case on the basis of any remote standard of causal analysis. Indeed, the report strikingly resembles the academic studies that have invoked relative and absolute deprivation theories to explain the American urban riots of the 1960s and which have repeatedly collapsed under the scrutiny of basic considerations of social science methodology. The causes of riots might as aptly fall into situational explanations, including the pattern of police response, as they fall into theoretical ones. While social scientists debate such issues, policy makers have had to respond to the realities of riots, both in terms of causes and effects. Surprisingly, many policy makers, irrespective of their own ideologies and notions of causes, when dealing with America’s urban riots, appear to have come to the same general conclusions about the policies that need to be implemented to prevent future racial crises. Looking at these responses, as well as both the idiosyncratic and common attributes of riots, this paper suggests reconceptualizing and rethinking the nature of riots so as to move toward a better understanding of this type of racial crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]